The Conservative Party’s Capitulation in the Culture War

It is almost thirty years since the label “culture war” was first attached to the relentless onslaught of liberalism, the ideology that misleadingly took its name from an adjective used by the Romans to denote generosity and all that is worthy of free people, against the traditions, religion, and ancestral ethnic groups of the Christian civilization that succeeded the Graeco-Roman civilization of antiquity. In Canada, the Liberal Party had turned the Supreme Court into a weapon of offence in this war by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to our Constitution in 1982 and in 1988 that weapon was used to strike down all the laws against abortion in Canada, scoring a major victory for what Pope John Paul II would a few years thereafter call “the culture of death.” At the time, the Progressive Conservative Party was inclined to fight back against liberalism and in 1989 introduced Bill C-43, which would re-criminalize abortion while allowing it in instances where a mother’s life was in danger. The bill passed in the House of Commons, but died on its third reading in the Senate in 1991, when it received a tie-vote. The Tories, lamentably, did not press the issue further and today it would appear that the Conservative Party has raised the white flag in the culture war.

Last month, when Justin Trudeau’s Liberals introduced Bill C-16, Rona Ambrose, the interim leader of the Conservative Party, declared that she would not oppose the bill. Several other Conservative MPs followed suit. Bill C-16 is the bill which will make it illegal to discriminate against transgender people, i.e., people who think that they are a sex other than the one they actually are. In practice, what this means is that public facilities designated for the use of one sex, including washrooms, change rooms, and showers, will be required by law to be open to people of the other sex who maintain that they think or feel that they are of the sex for which the facilities have been reserved. It also means that anyone who turns down someone who is in disagreement with their X and/or Y chromosomes as to what sex he/she/it is for a job, passes over for promotion, or fires that person, may face a charge of discrimination in which he will have to bear the impossible onus of somehow proving that he is not guilty of the crimethink of which he accused. If all that were not bad enough the bill will also make “hate speech” against transgender people into an offence punishable with up to two years in prison. Note that the words “hate speech” do not, as sane people might be tempted to think, merely refer to explicit incitement to violence but include the expression of thoughts that contradict what progressives have decided all enlightened people must believe. If ever there was a time for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to oppose something, this is it.

Yet, not only is the Conservative leader supporting this insane new bill but the party, in its national convention held later in the same month, voted by a very large margin to abandon its position that marriage is something that exists “between one man and one woman.” It also voted to change its policy on marijuana and to take the position that the possession of small amounts ought to be decriminalized. The latter is a much lesser matter than the former but we can see the same train of thought at work in both decisions. The Conservatives were trounced majorly by the Liberals in last fall’s election and are now reasoning that this was because the Liberal positions on same-sex “marriage” and marijuana were more popular than theirs and that this means they must change their positions in order to survive as a party. To reason this way seems to be a perennial temptation for Conservatives whenever they lose elections. As long as Conservatives keep succumbing to this temptation, liberalism will keep winning, and will keep moving further and further to the left, dragging the rest of us along with it. The Liberal Party already has a pair of doppelgangers in the NDP and Green Parties and it does not need another one in the Conservatives.

The idea that it was the Conservative Party’s right-wing positions on matters like marriage and election that cost them the last election is absurd when one considers that they had done next to nothing about these issues while they were in office for the last nine years, even in the four years in which they had a majority government. The Civil Marriage Act that created the legal fiction of same-sex “marriage” nation-wide – the courts had already done this at the provincial level through most of the country – was passed during the Liberal premiership of Paul Martin in 2005, the year before the Conservative took power. It was only in that first year that they attempted to re-open the issue, at a time when they had a minority government making it inevitable that the attempt would fail. Nor did they attempt to reintroduce restrictions on abortion – indeed, then Conservative leader Stephen Harper had declared that the abortion debate would not be reopened during his premiership. On the matter of doctor-assisted suicide, Steven Fletcher, at the time a Conservative MP, actually introduced legislation similar to the bill the Liberals are currently ramming through Parliament a year previously.

In other words, the Conservative Party had already basically surrendered in the culture war by the beginning of the Harper premiership. This surrender was even more complete when it comes to immigration and the issues surrounding it than with regards to abortion, same-sex “marriage”, euthanasia and the other issues that are conventionally categorized as “social.” In the late 1960s, during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals launched an aggressive assault against white Anglophone Canadians. Their weapons were mass immigration, the Canadian Human Rights Act, the public schools and the national news media. Under the pretence of making Canada’s immigration laws fair and race-neutral, which the Conservatives had already done during the premiership of John Diefenbaker in 1962 having a negligible effect on the composition of immigration, the Liberals changed that composition from being almost ninety per cent traditional European at the beginning of Pierre Trudeau’s premiership to being seventy per cent Third World by its end. In the Canadian Human Rights Act they made it a civilly liable offence to discriminate on the basis of race. On paper, this looks like it applies to everyone – whites cannot discriminate against blacks, blacks cannot discriminate against whites – but in practice it was only enforced against whites, and only intended to be enforced against whites. This anti-white bias is what the Liberals really mean whenever they say “protecting vulnerable minorities”. They turned the public schools into indoctrination camps to program people into thinking that racism, bigotry, discrimination, prejudice, and xenophobia – on the part of white people, that is - were all greater sins than Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust. The news media branded anyone who dared to publicly disagree with the Liberals on any of this as a Hitlerite even if, like the late Doug Collins, he was a man who actually fought against Hitler during the war. No subsequent government has dared to do anything about any of this, certainly not the thoroughly cucked Conservatives under Stephen Harper’s leadership.

While liberals claim open-mindedness and tolerance as their virtues, on all of these matters they have insisted every time they have scored a victory in the culture war that all discussion of the issue ought to be closed, and that people who disagree with them publically ought to be punished. Since Canadian liberalism has made it absolutely clear that it will accept no victory short of a Carthaginian peace in this culture war, the Conservatives, in the face of such an attitude, ought never to have ever contemplated surrender.

Having said that, I could have told you thirteen years ago that something like this would happen.

That was the year that the present Conservative Party was formed when the merger between the old Conservative Party and the right-populist Reform Party was completed. Theoretically this could have produced a superior party that would combine the best of both. From the original Conservative Party, formed in the year of Confederation and which under the leadership of Sir John A. MacDonald, Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, governed the country for nineteen of its first twenty-four years, it could have taken its royalism, patriotism, Anglophilia, and economic nationalism. To this it could have added the small town, rural common sense of the Reform Party, founded as a Western protest party in 1988, as well as its opposition to such things as bureaucratic overregulation, progressive social engineering, and socialist wealth redistribution. The social and cultural conservative defence of the Christian religion, its ethical teachings and its traditional and historical role in Canada, an element the two parties had in common, could have served as the glue to make such a union work.

I could not see this happening, however. The old Conservative Party was hardly recognizable as the party of Sir John A. MacDonald any more. Having foolishly added the adjective Progressive to its name in 1942, thus creating a self-contradicting title and a confused identity to go along with it, the party ousted in 1966, John Diefenbaker, a leader who was patriotically fighting for Canada’s traditional symbols such as the old flag against Liberals determined to replace them, and, back in power in the 1980s, abandoned its traditional anti-contintentalist economic nationalism and negotiated a free trade deal with the United States. After its one failed attempt to recriminalize abortion it gave up and it made the immigration problem, started by the Liberals, even worse by jacking the yearly target of immigrants to be accepted up through the roof. As for the Reform Party, or the Canadian Alliance as it was then called after an initial, incomplete, attempt at merging with the Conservatives, its capitalism was always more important to it than its social conservatism. By 2003 – indeed, long before then – capitalism had evolved from a relatively benign, small town, competitive market into a globalist economy controlled by multinational megacorporations who, as an examination of the list of those who have intervened legally against state governments south of the border that have sought to protect traditional marriage or even the freedom of conscience of traditional religious believers, will reveal, have joined forces with liberalism in the culture war. I predicted that the new party would join the worst elements of the two parties rather than the best, and that social conservatism would be the first thing on the chopping block. I decided it would not be worthwhile joining.

Unfortunately, since all the other parties in the House of Commons are completely and extremely liberal, the betrayal of the Conservatives leaves those of us who love this country and would like to pull it out of the abyss of cultural and moral insanity into which it has sunk without a voice in the federal legislative assembly.

Steven Fletcher, the Byfields, and the Failure of Canada's New Right

A little over twenty years ago, Dr. Samuel T. Francis, the American paleoconservative columnist who departed from this world far too soon ten years ago this month, saw a collection of several of his best essays and articles published by the University of Missouri Press under a title borrowed from Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers. The subtitle of the book was “Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism.” This was an interesting choice that raised many an eyebrow considering that the book saw print in the early 1990s, immediately after the period that mainstream American conservatism regarded as its moment of triumph, the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Dr. Francis looked beyond the superficiality of American conservatism’s seeming triumph and made the uncomfortable observation that the movement had failed to achieve a single one of its objectives – the restoration of their old republic, the rollback of the welfare state that was eroding America’s middle class, or victory in the war against the ongoing social, moral, and cultural revolution.

A recent conflux of occurrences could not help but bring to my mind certain parallels between this and the present state of Canadian conservatism. The February edition of the curiously titled monthly evangelical publication Christian Week features a cover story by Craig Macartney about a bill that had gone before the Senate for debate that would legalize assisted suicide. The focus of the article is upon how legalization has been gathering support among Christians. Steven Fletcher, the Winnipeg MP who authored the bill, is interviewed and pretty much the first thing he is cited as saying is that polls indicate “strong support for assisted suicide, even among professed Christians”. Perhaps Mr. Fletcher thinks that questions of what is true and right are matters to be settled by opinion polls.

Later in the article Fletcher comes off somewhat better as he predicts last Friday’s decision by the dotty old dolts, dingbats, and dipsticks on the Supreme Court to strike the laws against assisted suicide from the Criminal Code and indicates that it was in partial anticipation of this decision that he had authored the bill so that the question would not become a “free-for-all, with no restrictions”. Perhaps that is the best we can expect in this day and age in which case Mr. Fletcher doesn’t really deserve to be made the butt of a joke, inspired by the quadriplegic politician’s sharing a last name with the character played by Dame Angela Lansbury in her most celebrated role, and to have his bill dubbed “Murder He Wrote”. Whether Fletcher’s motives are noble or base, however, is not really the question or the point here. He is a member, not only of Parliament, but of the present Conservative Party which currently forms the majority government in Parliament, and a professing Christian to boot. That he would initiate a bill for the legalization of assisted suicide shows just how far that party has come from its roots.

The present Conservative Party claims two sets of roots for itself – those of the old Conservative Party, which had been around since before Confederation having been formed in Canada as a local version of the same party in Britain, and those of the Reform Party of Canada. In the late 1990s the “Unite the Right” movement led most of the old Conservative Party to join the Reform Party in what then became the Canadian Alliance. The full merger between the two parties into the present party was completed in the fall of 2003.

This merger has been alternately interpreted as both the triumph and the defeat of the Reform Party, the movement that gave birth to it, and the principles of that movement which we shall call the Canadian “New Right” for reasons that we will look at momentarily. These interpretations would seem to be mutually exclusive and the polar opposite of each other yet, paradoxically, they are both true. If success for a political movement is understood strictly in terms of the attainment of power then the New Right has succeeded, for the party it founded managed, first of all, to take over the old Conservative Party’s place as the main alternative to the Liberals, then to absorb that party into itself and take over its name, next to form a minority government in Parliament, and finally to win a majority in a federal election.

Yet, if we consider what the principles and objectives of the New Right movement actually were, the merger that led to the present government of Stephen Harper can hardly be viewed as a smashing success.

I have called this movement the Canadian “New Right” for two reasons. The first is its contrast with the Old Right. The Canadian Old Right, of which the original Conservative Party was the organized political expression, was a Canadian adaptation of British classical conservatism or Toryism. The essence of Canadian Toryism was loyalty to and defence of the traditions, and political, social, and cultural institutions, of Canada, especially her British heritage. It was fundamentally patriotic. The New Right, by contrast, had taken up the cause of Western regional dissatisfaction with Ottawa which it frequently expressed in anti-patriotic and anti-Canadian tones, with some of its leaders openly expressing or at least doing little to conceal their preference for American history, heritage, tradition and institutions over that of Canada. This antipatriotism was the ugliest aspect of the New Right and it was this that initially hindered the New Right from gaining strength outside of the West and becoming a national movement. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the leaders of the party the movement produced, chose to listen to their liberal and progressive critics who told them that it was the movement’s positions on social, moral, and cultural issues that was holding it back.

The second reason for calling the movement the Canadian New Right is the fact that it arose at the same time and in response to similar phenomena as parallel movements in the United States and Europe which were also known as the “New Right”.

The New Right, in Canada as in the United States and Europe, was born in the 1970s in response to the tidal wave of changes that had swept Western Civilization since the end of the Second World War. These included social and moral changes as Christian countries became more secular, Christianity, the Bible, and prayer were driven from public schools, as was much discipline due to new-fangled psychological and educational theories, the development of effective contraceptive technology led to the relaxing of both legal and cultural restraints on sexual behaviour, divorce became easily obtainable, abortion was legalized, a revolution against distinct roles for the sexes took place, and in which a kind of Western self-loathing took over the hearts and minds of the youth and their teachers in institutions of higher learning who came to see everything Western and Christian as oppressive and to venerate everything that was neither Western nor Christian. The Canadian New Right, just like the American New Right and the European New Right, was born out of righteous anger at this wave of changes and the desire to regain what had been swept away by it.

In Canada, the New Right grew and gained its greatest strength in the Western provinces. It was in the West that the remarkable periodical that became the movement’s primary organ was published for thirty years. It started out as the St. John’s Edmonton Report in 1973 when it was founded by Ted Byfield, a seasoned journalist turned Christian educator, but by the end of the decade had become the Alberta Report, the title under which it is still remembered today, despite undergoing a couple more name changes before ceasing publication in 2003, a few months before the merger that produced the present Conservative Party. For the largest part of its three decades of publication, its editor-publisher was Ted Byfield’s son Link who was also a Sun Media columnist, the founder of foundation/lobby the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy (1) as well as the co-founder of and a candidate for Alberta’s Wildrose Party. Link Byfield’s untimely death from cancer last month is the other in the conflux of occurrences that has brought about this reflection on the success and failure of the New Right which he and his father did so much to shape and form.

The Byfields were devout Christians. When my maternal grandmother introduced me to their magazine in the early 1990s she told me it was published by a family of “Christian fundamentalists”. More precisely, they were a family of conservative Anglicans who, having gotten fed up with liberal domination of the Anglican Church of Canada, had joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the case of the father and the Roman Catholic Church in the case of the son. To each issue of their magazine, the elder Byfield contributed, in addition to his last page editorial, a column called “Orthodoxy” which he co-wrote with his wife Virginia, devoted to religious issues. In 2001 the magazine ran advertisements a two-week tour of Israel and Greece, “Where Christian civilization was born”, that was to be hosted by Link Byfield and his wife Joanne. After the Report, Ted Byfield’s next project was a multi-volume history of Christianity from the days of Christ to the present. Opposition, rooted in Christianity, to the rapid social, moral, and cultural decay that has been rotting Canada and the rest of the civilization that used to be Christendom, was the basis of their editorial perspective and since their magazine paved the way for the creation of the Reform Party of Canada in 1988, this social conservatism was clearly the foundation of the New Right movement.

This is why the present Conservative government is more truthfully to be regarded as the failure of the New Right rather than its success. As the Reform Party grew from a Western regional party to a party that could potentially form the government in Ottawa it was constantly being told that its social conservatism was the baggage holding it back, preventing it from gaining the support it would need to oust the Liberals from government. As leader of the united Conservative party, Stephen Harper has refused to re-open the debates on abortion and same-sex marriage, even after that vapid twit Justin Trudeau and that creep Thomas Mulcair provided him with the perfect window of opportunity to do so last year, by declaring that anyone who did not toe the progressive party line on these issues was no longer welcome in their parties. Now, one of his own members has initiated a bill that would open the door to euthanasia in this country.

The idea that its social conservatism would have perpetually kept the New Right localized in the West as a regional protest movement is nonsense. Are the majority of Canadians outside the Western provinces – or at least in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec – really happy with unlimited abortion-on-demand, the ensuing low birth and fertility rates, dependence upon large scale immigration with no effort to assimilate the newcomers to keep up the population, high rates of illegitimacy among those children who are born, high divorce rates, and all the other rot that social conservatism objected to? That seems extremely difficult to believe. Even if that turns out to be the case, the leaders of what used to be the New Right and the Reform Party need to ask themselves whether attaining a majority government in Ottawa was worth the price of sacrificing all of the goals they hoped to accomplish in order to do so. Which is another way of asking what Jesus Christ asked two thousand years ago:

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

(1) The Byfields transferred ownership of the magazine from their United Western Communications company to this organization for the last few months of its run. Unfortunately, when they did so they changed the name of the magazine to Citizens Centre Report, by far the least attractive sounding of the many variations on “Report” under which it had been published.

Yet Another Big Leap Downwards

The Whiteoak Brothers is, in order of publication, the thirteenth in Mazo de la Roche’s series of novels chronicling the lives of the Whiteoak family of Jalna manor in rural Ontario. Set in the year 1923 it is the sixth in the series by order of internal chronology. In the sixteenth chapter of the novel, Wakefield Whiteoak, the youngest of the family’s third generation, is placed under the tutorage of the Reverend Mr. Fennell, the rector of the Anglican parish church that had been built by his grandfather Captain Whiteoak. He was unable to attend regular classes due to a diagnosis of a weak heart and had previously been taught by his older sister Meg, who now found him too much of a handful. In their first session with the vicar they discuss Wakefield’s grandmother, who is approaching her centennial, causing the rector to speculate:

“If you live to her age, I wonder what sort of world this will be. The year 2013—hm.”

We, of course, do not need to engage in such speculation as we are now living in the second year beyond the annum specified. I suspect that if a vision of the present day had been given to a clergyman ninety years ago he would have been horrified at what he saw. A great many changes have occurred since 1923 and, indeed, since 1953, the year the words quoted above saw print for the first time. They have almost all been for the worse, but that goes without saying as the vast majority of all change – a good 99.99% at least – is always for the worse.

Some of these changes have been specific to Canada, rendering our country virtually unrecognizable as the same Dominion in which the Jalna saga is set, and in which de la Roche, who died in 1961, lived all her life. We are coming up close, for example, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearson Liberals’ changing of our national flag from the Canadian Red Ensign to the Maple Leaf, which, despite Allan Levine’s recent remarks to the contrary in the opinion pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, was an attack on our country’s British heritage, and a slap in the face of all the Canadian veterans who fought under the Red Ensign in our country’s finest moment when we stood with Britain against the Axis powers from the beginning of the Second World War.

Other changes, however, have been part of a wave of change that has swept Western civilization as a whole. There are many factors that contributed to bringing about this wave of change. One of these was the drawing to an end of the Modern Age, itself brought about by the triumph of liberalism, the moving and energizing spirit of the Modern Age, which had more or less completed all of its original goals by the middle of the twentieth century (and had also seen its claims to be able to provide a better and brighter future for man aptly refuted and debunked by the two World Wars, the rise of a whole new scale of tyranny made possible by modernity in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the invention of the atomic bomb). Another factor was cultural Marxism, i.e., the infiltration and takeover of the political, social, academic, cultural, and other institutions of Western civilization by those who were intent upon redirecting these institutions towards the subversion of the civilization and ordered societies they comprise.

This wave of change has not yet ebbed out or shown any indication that it will do so within the foreseeable future. Instead, it has swept away yet another remnant of what used to be our civilization, as the Supreme Court of Canada, yesterday, in a unanimous decision, struck down the law against assisted suicide. Their ruling, in a case brought before them by the BC Civil Liberties Association, was that the law violated the worthless appendage to our constitution that Pierre Trudeau tacked on when he had it repatriated in 1982. Last year, Steven Fletcher, the MP for Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia here in Winnipeg had introduced bills that would have legalized assisted suicide in certain circumstances. It is expected that Parliament will pass new laws to replace the ones struck down. If the present government’s track record is anything to go by I would not anticipate any improvement. In December of 2013 the Supreme Court struck down our laws against prostitution and the present government replaced them with a horrible new unjust law based on a bill passed by the rabidly egalitarian, socialist, and feminist government of Sweden in 1999.

There is a great deal of muddled thinking about assisted suicide today. Suicide means the deliberate taking of positive action towards ending one’s life. The person who knowingly ingests cyanide is committing suicide, the person who refuses treatment that will prolong his life, is not. It needs to be clear that to prohibit assisted suicide does not mean that people should be forced to go on life support, to take chemotherapy, or undergo any other potentially life-extending treatment. The question of assisted suicide is not even a question of whether a person has the right to take his own life or not, although the assertion that he does ought be challenged because it is itself a manifestation of an idea that is far too uncritically accepted today, namely the autonomy of the individual and his absolute right to do whatever he wills provided that others are not adversely affected It is a question of whether he has the right to involve other people in the deliberate termination of his life. This is a question to which the answer ought to be a resounding no. Of course nobody should have the right to place the burden of terminating his life on another person’s shoulders.

Allowing assisted suicide is the first step down a slippery slope. The next step is allowing doctors to decide to terminate the lives of people who cannot make the decision to terminate their lives for themselves. Make no mistake – this next step will follow the first one. For decades now, the kind of people who have been making radical changes have been pooh-poohing everyone who has warned about a slippery slope, and each time we ended up sliding down that slope. The justices of the Supreme Court of Canada must be frothing-at-the-mouth mad to think it wise or right to start the ball rolling on giving physicians, a notoriously arrogant class of people who have great difficulty with differentiating or distinguishing between themselves and God, the power of life and death. Apart from the matter of their inflated egos, physicians are required to swear a solemn oath that includes a pledge to do no harm. Terminating someone’s life is the ultimate in harmdoing. The physician willing to assist in suicide, therefore, is an oathbreaker, and hence somebody who should not be trusted, and certainly not trusted with power over whether people live or die.

Years ago, the television cartoon The Simpsons ran an episode in which Homer Simpson was put in a coma by an exploding beer can in an April Fool’s joke gone wrong. Mr. Burns, complaining of the hospital bills his company’s insurance was having to cover, brought in Dr. Nick Riviera who looked at Homer and concluded “Oh dear, I can find no signs of life. Just to be safe, we’d better pull the plug”. At the time this was brilliant satire. Now, thanks to our satire-killing Supreme Court, it seems more like a dark foreshadowing of things to come.

It would be nice to think that those who we send to Parliament to write Her Majesty’s laws for us will find away of rescuing us from the goofy decision by the clowns on the bench to allow the medical profession to decide whether we live or die. I wouldn’t wager a plugged nickel on that happening, though. I’m afraid things are only going to progress from here in the more honest meaning of the word progress, i.e., get worse.